1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the field of computer systems, and, more particularly, to visualization systems of such.
2. Description of Background
Modern enterprises and organizations increasingly span across multiple geographical locations. At the same time, they collaborate with more and more other enterprises and organizations, resulting in a complex system of operational units. These units are usually heterogeneous and independent. Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) is the messaging infrastructure that allows the various disparate units to achieve seamless and federated communication.
Publish/subscribe messaging has become a central communication paradigm in many MOMs. Its indirect and loose coupling between sending endpoints (e.g., publishers) and receiving endpoints (e.g., subscribers) enables dynamic interoperation as well as scalable service provisioning. Typically, users of a specific location or operational unit form a local messaging domain and are served collectively by a dedicated publish/subscribe broker. Brokers at different locations are then interconnected, resulting in a Publish/Subscribe Broker Overlay Network across a potentially wide area. The central role of the broker overlay network is to route messages across local messaging domains. Messages published to a local broker flow through the broker overlay network via an overlay path to finally reach a different subscribing broker where they are delivered to the subscriber(s) in that broker's local messaging domain.
Publish/subscribe is a messaging paradigm that differs from traditional point-to-point communications in the sense that message senders and message receivers may not be directly aware of each other. Instead, messages are associated with a specific “topic” that represents a common communication pipe. Such systems typically interconnect publishers and subscribers across several offices, geographical locations, or even across multiple organizations. To achieve the above requirement, each functional unit is served by a messaging broker, which handles the reception and delivery of messages within a particular unit. The actual clients that publish and subscribe to topics are called messaging clients. Several clients can be associated with a messaging broker and publish or subscribe to a particular topic. The various messaging brokers are then interconnected over the physical network in an overlay. A link between two brokers is called an overlay link and corresponds to an underlying physical connection between the brokers, such as an Internet path, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection, and/or the like.